Art Viewing Adventures: Kara Walker’s Big Imagination (Virtual)

Learn about MacArthur Foundation award winner Kara Walker and her current installation at SFMOMA, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine). With wit and elegance, Walker’s fantastic automatons confront troubling histories of race and gender and transmit the power of the human soul. Inspired by medieval mechanical icons, dolls, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and situated in a field of black obsidian from Lake County’s Mt Konocti, the installation is free to view in the Roberts Family Gallery until Spring 2026.

Walker has created a powerful body of work by examining “the peculiar institution” at the center of the American experience: the enslavement of African Americans. Well known for her silhouetted figures, Walker has expanded into large-scale public projects, such as 2014’s A Subtlety: Or…the Marvelous Sugar Baby at the abandoned Domino Sugar Plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Fons Americanus, a four-tiered fountain “counter monument” at London’s Tate Modern that she described as “a gift…to the heart of an Empire that redirected the fates of the world.” Inspired by art history, folklore, tradition, technology, and philosophy, Walker’s art inspires hope in a fragmented world. 

Art Educator and Museum Guide Avril Angevine returns to Art Viewing Adventures to discuss this fascinating artist.

(Image: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), Kara Walker, 2024)

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